Medications and, in particular, oral solid medications, are packaged in a variety of manners. One type of packaging that has become popular, both in retail consumer settings and within hospitals and other healthcare facilities, is a unit dose blister pack. A unit dose blister pack includes a backing member and a blister mounted upon the backing member and defining a cavity for storing a medication. Typically, a single dose of medication is stored within the cavity, such as by storing a single pill within a cavity. Unit dose blister packs have become popular for a variety of reasons, including the ease or readiness with which a medication dispensed in a unit dose blister pack can be administered. Additionally, unit dose blister packs may provide smaller and/or less expensive packaging than that available for medications packaged by a pharmacy.
One approach for dispensing medication within a hospital or other healthcare facility involves the use of automated dispensing cabinets located throughout the facility. These automated dispensing cabinets are stocked by a pharmacy, typically with a wide variety of medications. Nurses or other healthcare professionals may then access the automated dispensing cabinets in a secure manner in order to withdraw medications prescribed for patients, many of which are generally located in the vicinity of the automated dispensing cabinet.
Unit dose blister packs are stocked in automated dispensing cabinets since the unit dose blister packs provide for efficient storage of the various medications. Typically, complete unit dose blister pack cards are provided by the pharmacy and stocked by the automated dispensing cabinets. A full unit dose blister card includes a plurality of unit dose blister packs connected, such as by means of perforations, to form an integral card. In order to administer the medication of a unit dose pack to a patient, a nurse or other healthcare professional must generally separate a unit dose blister pack from the remainder of the unit dose blister card, with the remainder of the unit dose blister card remaining within the automated dispensing cabinet. Although it is generally preferred by a nurse or other healthcare professional to retrieve a singulated unit dose blister pack from an automated dispensing cabinet in comparison to taking the additional time required to separate a unit dose blister pack from the remainder of the unit dose blister card, unit dose blister cards are generally stocked within automated dispensing cabinets since the unit dose blister cards are generally easier to pick within the pharmacy and may assist with inventory management.
With regard to the picking of unit dose blister cards within the pharmacy, the unit dose blister cards are generally picked manually since automated or robotic dispensation systems generally provide for the dispensation of unit dose medications only in instances in which the unit dose medications have been over-bagged. It has also been observed in instances in which individually packaged unit dose medications, such as singulated unit dose blister packs or over-bagged unit dose medications, are available to be picked that a plurality of individually packaged unit dose medications must frequently be selected in order to fill an order requiring two, three or more doses of the medications, thereby necessitating multiple pick operations. Although the multiple pick operations required to dispense a plurality of individually packaged unit dose medications might suggest that unit dose blister cards containing multiple unit dose blister packs would be more favored, the number of unit dose blister packs that is dispensed for a single patient is generally much fewer than the number of unit dose blister packs included within a unit dose blister card. For example, it may be somewhat common to dispense two unit dose blister packs for the same patient, but not the ten unit dose blister packs that may be included within a single unit dose blister card.
As such, it may be desirable to provide an improved system and method for automatically dispensing unit dose packages in order to, for example, reduce the number of pick operations and to increase the relative efficiency with which the unit dose packages are dispensed.